Socrates and Plato - Introduction and Epicurean Guide

Why Plato Matters to Epicureans

Socrates (469–399 BC) wrote nothing. He spent his life in the streets of Athens questioning his fellow citizens about virtue, and in 399 BC he was tried and put to death on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. His pupil Plato (about 428–347 BC) made him the chief speaker of a series of dialogues that are among the most widely read books in the world. In about 387 BC Plato founded a school in the grove of the hero Academus outside Athens, the Academy, which lasted in one form or another for nine centuries. Aristotle studied there for twenty years.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) was born six years after Plato’s death. When he came to Athens at eighteen, Plato’s pupil Xenocrates was head of the Academy (DL X.1), and one ancient report says that Epicurus had earlier been “a disciple of Pamphilus the Platonist in Samos” (DL X.14). Epicurus therefore knew Platonism from the inside, and his own philosophy can be read as a point-by-point rejection of it.

Plato matters to Epicureans for three main reasons.

First, Plato built the world that Epicurus rejected. In Plato’s dialogues the things we see and touch are only shadows of a higher reality, the eternal Forms, which can be known only by the mind. The senses deceive us. The soul is immortal, existed before birth and will be judged after death. The world was made by a divine craftsman who “desired that all things should be good and nothing bad,” and the stars are gods. Pleasure is not the good. “Those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead.” Point by point, this is the world that Epicurus denied.

Second, Plato’s world outlived Epicurus’s. The Platonic tradition passed into the Stoics, who took over Plato’s creator god, into the later Platonists, and through them into Christianity. Saint Augustine wrote that of all the philosophers the Platonists came nearest to the Christian faith (City of God VIII). For most of the Middle Ages Plato’s Timaeus, with its account of the creation of the world, was the work of Greek philosophy best known in the Latin West. Much of what Epicureans today must argue against reaches us in Plato’s words.

Third, Plato’s arguments against pleasure are the source of nearly all the later arguments against Epicurus. The charge that pleasure is the good of “a leaky jar,” that the absence of pain is only a “neutral state,” that a life of pleasure is a life fit for cattle, that virtue cannot be “an exchange of pleasures for pleasures,” all come from Plato. Many of them were aimed at other men, such as Callicles in the Gorgias, who held views quite different from Epicurus’s. But they have been used against Epicurus ever since, and Epicureans need to know where they come from and why they miss the mark.

The rest of this introduction follows the three divisions of Epicurean philosophy: the Canon, or how we know the truth; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live. Each section states Plato’s position in his own words, with links to the passages in the dialogues on this site, and then sets out the Epicurean response. The dialogues themselves follow, each with an Epicurean guide of its own and a linked outline:

• Apology: Socrates’ defence at his trial, his “divine sign,” and death as sleep or migration.
• Meno: can virtue be taught? Learning as recollection of what the immortal soul knew before birth.
• Phaedo: the death of Socrates and the arguments for the immortality of the soul.
• Gorgias: Socrates against Callicles on whether pleasure is the good.
• Republic: justice, the ideal state, the Forms and the Cave, the comparison of pleasures, and the myth of Er.
• Theaetetus: the refutation of the claim that knowledge is perception.
• Timaeus: the creation of the world by the divine craftsman.
• Philebus: pleasure and wisdom compared.
• Laws Book X: the case against the materialists, and the laws against impiety.

Plato and Epicurus: The Historical Record

What Epicurus Said About Plato

Diogenes Laertius records the names that Epicurus gave to the other philosophers. “The followers of Plato he called ‘Flatterers of Dionysus,’ and Plato himself ‘The golden man’.” The first name refers to Plato’s visits to the court of the tyrants of Syracuse, Dionysius I and Dionysius II, where he tried to put his political ideas into practice. The second may mock Plato’s myth of the metals in the Republic, in which the rulers have gold mixed into their souls (415a).

The Epicurean Velleius on the Timaeus

In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods the Epicurean Velleius begins by rejecting “the artisan deity and world-builder of Plato’s Timaeus,” together with “that old hag of a fortune-teller, the Pronoia … of the Stoics.” He asks what tools and helpers Plato’s god could have used, and he presses Plato on a contradiction: “the thinker who represented the world not merely as having had an origin but even as almost made by hand, also declared that it will exist for ever. Can you suppose that a man can have even dipped into natural philosophy if he imagines that anything that has come into being can be eternal?”

Velleius treats Plato and the Stoics together, and rightly so. The Stoics took over Plato’s creator god and his providence, and the Epicureans answered both with the same arguments. When Epicurus attacked the Timaeus, he was attacking the Stoics as well.

Colotes Against the Platonists

Epicurus’s pupil Colotes wrote a book arguing that it is impossible to live according to the teachings of the other philosophers, including Socrates and Plato, and other works attacking Plato’s Lysis and Euthydemus. He also criticized the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, asking why a philosopher who claims to teach the truth should tell a fable. Four centuries later the Platonist Plutarch wrote a whole treatise, Against Colotes, to answer him, and another, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible. The quarrel between the Garden and the Academy was still alive in the second century AD.

The Academy Turns Skeptic

About fifty years after Plato’s death the Academy itself changed course. Under Arcesilaus and later Carneades it taught that nothing can be known for certain, and it attacked both the Stoics and the Epicurean trust in the senses. This is the Academy of Cicero’s Academic Questions, and its arguments are preserved at length by Sextus Empiricus (see the Sextus Empiricus introduction). Lucretius answers the skeptic in a famous line: “if a man believe that nothing is known, he knows not whether this even can be known, since he admits he knows nothing” (On the Nature of Things IV.469–470, tr. Munro).

The Canon: How Plato Says We Know

The Senses Deceive

Plato’s theory of knowledge begins with distrust of the senses. In the Phaedo Socrates asks: “Have the sight and hearing of men any truth in them, or is it true, as the poets are always telling us, that we neither hear nor see any thing accurately?” When the soul “tries to consider anything in company with the body, it is evidently deceived by it.” The soul thinks best “when none of these things troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor any pleasure.” When it uses the senses, “it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man.”

The Timaeus draws the same line. “That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.”

Epicurus held the opposite. “Nor is there anything which can refute the sensations.” Reason cannot refute them, “for all reason is dependent upon sensations.” Error comes from the opinions we add, not from the senses themselves.

The Forms

Plato’s answer to the unreliability of the senses is the theory of Forms: eternal, unchanging realities such as “absolute beauty and good and greatness,” which the mind can know and which are the true causes of things. The highest of them is the Form of the Good, which “may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence.”

In the allegory of the Cave, ordinary men are prisoners “living in a underground den,” chained so that they see only shadows thrown on a wall. The world of the senses is the world of shadows. Plato carries this so far that he tells the student of astronomy not to learn from looking at the sky: “whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn.”

For Epicurus there is no world of Forms behind the world we see. Our general ideas, the “preconceptions,” are formed from repeated sensations, and they are tested against the senses, not the other way round. The real causes of things are bodies and their motions, which we know by reasoning from what we see.

Learning Is Recollection

How can the mind know the Forms if it does not learn them through the senses? Plato’s answer is that the soul knew them before birth. “Seeing then that the soul is immortal and has been born many times, and has beheld all things both in this world and in the nether realms, she has acquired knowledge of all and everything,” so that “research and learning are wholly recollection.” In the Meno Socrates questions a slave boy about geometry and claims that the boy, “without anyone having taught him,” recovers the knowledge “out of himself.” In the Phaedo the same argument is used to prove that the soul existed before birth (72e–77a).

Epicurus held that “all thoughts have their origin in sensations by means of coincidence and analogy and similarity and combination, reasoning too contributing something” (DL X.32). The slave boy learns from a figure drawn before his eyes.

Knowledge Is Not Perception

The Theaetetus is Plato’s most careful argument against the senses as the standard of truth. Theaetetus proposes that “knowledge is nothing else than perception.” Socrates ties this at once to Protagoras’s saying that man is “the measure of all things” and to the doctrine “that all things are in motion, like streams.” Then he argues that the soul perceives through the senses as through instruments, and grasps being and truth by itself: “knowledge is not in the sensations, but in the process of reasoning about them.” Therefore “perception and knowledge could never be the same.”

The strategy is worth noticing. Plato does not argue against the senses as Epicurus understood them. He joins trust in the senses to Protagoras’s relativism and Heraclitus’s flux, and refutes the combination. Epicurus held neither of these doctrines. He held that every sensation truly reports what strikes the sense organ, that error lies in added opinion, and that the atoms themselves do not change. Later critics of Epicurus often repeated Plato’s move, treating any trust in the senses as if it were Protagoras’s “man is the measure.”

Summary: Two Different Canons

• Plato: the senses deceive and show only a world of becoming. True knowledge is of the eternal Forms, grasped by the mind alone, which recollects what the soul knew before birth.
• Epicurus: the senses are the first standard of truth. General ideas are built from sensations, error lies in added opinion, and the feelings of pleasure and pain are the standard of good and evil.

Physics: The Divine Craftsman Against the Atoms

Socrates Turns Away from Nature

In the Apology Socrates denies that he investigates “the things beneath the earth and in the heavens.” In the Phaedo he tells how he lost his early enthusiasm for “the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature.” He was hopeful when he heard that Anaxagoras made mind the cause of all things, but disappointed when Anaxagoras “made no use of intelligence, and did not assign any real causes for the ordering of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water.” To explain why Socrates is sitting in prison by his “bones and sinews” is to miss the real cause, which is his choice of what is best.

This passage marks a turning point in Greek thought. From here on, Plato and his successors demanded that nature be explained by purpose, by what is “best,” and treated explanations in terms of bodies and their motions as superficial. Epicurus, following Democritus, returned to the explanation of nature by bodies, and insisted that it is the only explanation that frees us from fear. “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe, but suspects the truth of some mythical story” (Principal Doctrine 12).

The Creation of the World

The Timaeus gives Plato’s account of how the world came to be. “Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause,” and the creator looked to an eternal pattern, since “the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.” Why did he make it? “He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything,” and “finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order.” The world is a single living creature with a soul, the stars are gods, and the creator hands the making of mortal creatures to the lesser gods (41).

Epicurus rejected each step. The universe is infinite and uncreated, made of atoms and void, and “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours.” No god made them, because a blessed and immortal being “knows no trouble itself, nor causes trouble to any other” (Principal Doctrine 1). Lucretius calls the belief that the gods made the world for men “all sheer folly,” and points to its defects: “the nature of the world has by no means been made for us by divine power: so great are the defects with which it stands encumbered.”

Against the Materialists: Laws Book X

In his last work Plato attacked the materialist view of the world directly. Its source, he says, is a doctrine held by men of science: “all things which are coming into existence, or have or will come into existence, do so partly by nature, partly by art, and partly owing to chance.” The elements “all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art,” and by their chance combinations “they have brought into being the whole Heaven and all that is in the Heaven, and all animals, too, and plants … not owing to reason, nor to any god or art.” These men say also that the gods exist “by art and not by nature,” by human convention, and that justice is a convention too.

Plato wrote this before Epicurus was born, but it is a fair description of the view Epicurus would defend. Plato’s answer is that soul, not body, comes first: the soul is “one of the first existences, and prior to all bodies,” defined as “the motion able to move itself.” Since soul is the cause of all motion, the heavens are moved by souls, and these souls are gods. Epicurus answered that the atoms move eternally by their own weight, and that the soul is a compound of fine atoms which comes to be and passes away with the body.

The Gods Care for Men, and Unbelief Is a Crime

Book X of the Laws names three kinds of impiety: to believe that the gods do not exist, to believe “that the gods exist, but have no care for men,” or to believe “that they are easy to win over when bribed by offerings and prayers.” The second is the Epicurean position. Plato argues against it that a god who neglected small things would be like an idle man, “a man most like to sting-less drones.”

Then Plato makes unbelief a crime. Anyone who meets with impiety must report it “by informing the magistrates.” There will be a prison “named the reformatory,” where unbelievers will be held and admonished, and if a man “be convicted again on a like charge, he shall be punished by death” (909a).

Plato also wanted the stories of the gods controlled by the state. In the Republic the guardians must be taught that “God, if he be good, is not the author of all things,” and the poets who say otherwise must be silenced. The rulers will tell the citizens a “royal lie” that God mixed gold, silver, brass and iron in their souls. For Plato, religion is both true and useful, and its usefulness justifies lies and punishments.

Epicurus taught that the gods are blessed and immortal and that they neither govern the world nor punish men. “The impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many” (DL X.123). The Epicurean attack on religious fear is in part an attack on the use of the gods as an instrument of rule.

The Immortal Soul and the Afterlife

Most of the Phaedo is an argument that the soul is immortal: it comes from the dead and returns to them, it knew the Forms before birth, it resembles the divine and unchanging, and it brings life and so cannot admit death. “The soul is like the divine and the body like the mortal.” The Republic adds a proof that “the soul of man is immortal and imperishable.”

Each of these dialogues ends with a myth of judgment after death: the Gorgias, which Socrates offers “as the truth,” the Phaedo, whose myth a man “ought to repeat such things to himself as if they were magic charms,” and the Republic, which ends with the myth of Er and the advice to follow justice “considering that the soul is immortal.” In Plato, the promise and threat of the afterlife are used to support the moral life.

Lucretius answered the Phaedo in the third book of On the Nature of Things, with dozens of proofs that “the nature of the mind and soul is bodily” and mortal, concluding: “Death therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal.”

Ethics: The Good Against Pleasure

Virtue and the Examined Life

Socrates told his judges that “to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” In the Meno he concludes that virtue “is imparted to us by a divine dispensation without understanding in those who receive it.” In the Theaetetus the goal of life is “to become like God, so far as this is possible,” and to become like God “is to become righteous and holy and wise.” In each case virtue is either the end itself or a step toward the divine.

For Epicurus virtue is the means to the pleasant life. “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly,” and it is for the sake of that pleasant life that the virtues are chosen.

Not an Exchange of Pleasures

In the Phaedo Socrates admits that ordinary men are temperate in order to obtain greater pleasures, and rejects this as false virtue: “this is not the right way to purchase virtue, by exchanging pleasures for pleasures, and pains for pains, and fear for fear, and greater for less, as if they were coins.” The only true coin is wisdom, and virtue based on the weighing of pleasures is “a painted imitation of virtue.”

This is exactly what Epicurus taught: “by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters.” The wise man gives up some pleasures to avoid greater pains, and accepts some pains to obtain greater pleasures. For Plato this is a counterfeit. For Epicurus it is prudence, “the beginning and the greatest good.”

Callicles Is Not Epicurus

The Gorgias contains the most famous of Plato’s arguments against pleasure. Socrates’ opponent Callicles holds that “he who would live rightly should let his desires be as strong as possible and not chasten them,” and that “luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness.” Socrates compares such a soul to “a leaky jar,” and asks whether a man “who has an itch and wants to scratch, and may scratch in all freedom, can pass his life happily in continual scratching.” Callicles is driven to admit that some pleasures are better and some worse, and Socrates concludes that “it is for the sake of what is good that we should do everything, including what is pleasant, not the good for the sake of the pleasant.”

These arguments have been used against Epicurus for two thousand years. But Callicles’ view is not Epicurus’s. Epicurus taught that unlimited desires lead to pain, that “the wealth demanded by nature is both limited and easily procured; that demanded by idle imaginings stretches on to infinity” (Principal Doctrine 15), and that justice is a compact among men, not a convention for the weak to be overthrown by the strong. Epicurus agreed that some pleasures should be avoided. His reason was not that they fall short of a higher good, but that they bring more pain than pleasure: “Every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen” (DL X.129).

Pleasure and Wisdom: The Philebus

The Philebus is Plato’s fullest treatment of pleasure. Socrates asks whether a life of pleasure without any wisdom, memory or knowledge would be worth living, and Protarchus, who began by saying “Having pleasure I should have all things,” is brought to agree that it would not. The dialogue ends with a ranking of goods in which “pleasure is not the first of possessions, nor yet the second,” but comes after measure, proportion, mind and knowledge.

Epicurus never proposed a life of pleasure without wisdom or memory. For him memory and expectation are among the chief sources of pleasure, and prudence is the greatest good because it secures the pleasant life. Plato’s opponent in the Philebus is again a straw man.

The “Neutral State” and the Absence of Pain

One of Plato’s arguments goes to the heart of Epicurean ethics. In Republic IX Socrates argues that between pleasure and pain there is “a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain,” a kind of rest. Sick men say that nothing is pleasanter than health, and men in pain that nothing is pleasanter than relief. But “how, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?” Those who think so “err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain, which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white.” The same argument appears in the Philebus, where Socrates speaks of men who “think that they have pleasure when they are free from pain,” and in the Timaeus, which explains pleasure as the sudden replenishment of a body that has been emptied (64–65).

Epicurus answered this argument directly. “Epicurus consequently maintained that there ‘is no such thing as a neutral state of feeling’ intermediate between pleasure and pain,” for the state “characterized as it is by entire absence of pain, is itself, he held, a pleasure, and, what is more, a pleasure of the highest order.” A living being that is conscious at all feels either pleasure or pain. “The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful” (Principal Doctrine 3).

This exchange matters for how Epicurus is read today. Plato’s claim that the absence of pain is only a grey, neutral condition is the source of the long tradition of treating Epicurean pleasure as a mere absence, a passive calm, and of asking whether Epicurus “really” meant pleasure at all. Epicurus’s point was the reverse. When all pain is removed, what remains is not grey but the full experience of being alive, which is pleasure.

Justice: Nature or Compact

In the Republic Glaucon states the view that men “think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither” doing nor suffering injustice, “hence there arise laws and mutual covenants.” He illustrates it with the ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible. The rest of the Republic is meant to refute this view and show that justice is the health of the soul and is good in itself.

Glaucon’s account is close to Epicurus’s: “Justice never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another … it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed” (Principal Doctrine 33). Epicurus answered the ring of Gyges as well: the unjust man can never be sure of escaping detection, and so can never live free of fear (Principal Doctrines 34–35).

Philosopher-Kings and the Private Life

Plato’s answer to the problems of politics is that “until philosophers are kings … cities will never have rest from their evils.” He tried twice to put this into practice at the court of Syracuse, which is why Epicurus called his followers “Flatterers of Dionysus.” Epicurus took the opposite view: the wise man “will not take part in public life,” except when necessary, and he seeks security among friends rather than power over a city.

Death

Plato’s Socrates offers two views of death. In the Apology, “either it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no consciousness of anything, or it is, as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place.” In the Phaedo, the philosopher’s whole life is a preparation for death: “the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.”

Epicurus took the first view of the Apology and made it the whole truth: “death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.” And he rejected the Phaedo’s view of philosophy as a practice for dying. The right understanding of death “makes the mortality of life enjoyable,” and philosophy is a preparation for living.

Where Plato Helps the Epicurean Case

Plato is a hostile witness, but in several places he supplies material that Epicureans can use.

• Death as a dreamless sleep. Socrates’ first alternative in the Apology, that death may be “like a sleep in which the sleeper does not even dream,” is very close to Epicurus’s own view, and Socrates calls it “a wonderful gain.”
• Justice as a compact. Glaucon’s speech in Republic II is the earliest full statement of the view of justice that Epicurus adopted, and it is stated with great force (358e–360d).
• The materialists before Epicurus. Laws X is one of the best surviving reports of the natural philosophy of the generation before Epicurus, and of its claim that the gods and justice are human conventions (888e–890a).
• The contest of pleasure. Even Plato could not let the question of pleasure go. In Republic IX he calculates that the just king lives “729 times more pleasantly” than the tyrant. In the Philebus he admits “true pleasures,” such as “those which are given by beauty of colour and form, and most of those which arise from smells,” that have no pain mixed with them. And in the Protagoras, not on this site, Socrates himself argues that the art of living is an art of measuring pleasures and pains.
• Praise of sight. In the Timaeus, Plato’s distrust of the senses gives way for a moment: “had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered,” and from sight “we have derived philosophy.”

None of this makes Plato an ally. Each concession serves Plato’s order: the Forms in place of atoms, the craftsman in place of nature, the immortal soul in place of the mortal one, and virtue, wisdom and the divine in place of pleasure.

Plato’s Long Shadow

The Academy, the Stoics and the Later Platonists

Plato’s school lasted, with changes, until the sixth century AD. The Stoics took over his creator god and his providence, and the later Platonists, from Plutarch in the first century AD to Plotinus in the third, turned his dialogues into a religious philosophy of the soul’s ascent to the divine. Plutarch wrote three works against the Epicureans. Throughout antiquity the Platonists and the Stoics, for all their differences, stood together against Epicurus on the questions of providence, the soul and pleasure.

Christianity

The Christian writers found in Plato much that they could use: a creator god, an immortal soul judged after death, a world of eternal truths above the senses, and contempt for the pleasures of the body. Augustine’s high regard for the Platonists set the pattern for the Latin West. Through Augustine, and later through the revival of Plato in Renaissance Florence, where Marsilio Ficino translated all the dialogues into Latin, Plato became the pagan philosopher most at home in Christian thought, while Epicurus remained the type of the unbeliever.

The Modern World

In the twentieth century the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the European philosophical tradition “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, 1929). The habits of thought that Plato established are still with us: the belief that the senses deceive and that truth lies in abstractions beyond them; the belief that the mind or soul is something other than the body; the belief that pleasure is at best a by-product of a higher good; and the belief that the absence of pain is a neutral state. Epicureans who meet these ideas today should know that they are not neutral observations about the world but positions that Plato argued for, and that Epicurus answered.

The Dialogues

Plato’s works are dialogues, nearly all with Socrates as the main speaker. Since the edition of Henri Estienne (Stephanus) in 1578, every passage has been cited by Stephanus page and section letter, so that Republic 514a means page 514, section a. Every Stephanus reference on the dialogue pages of this site is a link target.

Dialogue	Subject	On this site
Apology	Socrates’ defence at his trial	Fowler (1914)
Meno	Can virtue be taught? Learning as recollection	Lamb (1924)
Phaedo	The death of Socrates; the immortality of the soul	Fowler (1914)
Gorgias	Rhetoric, power, and whether pleasure is the good	Lamb (1925)
Republic	Justice, the ideal state, the Forms, pleasure, the afterlife	Jowett (1888)
Theaetetus	What is knowledge? Against “knowledge is perception”	Fowler (1921)
Timaeus	The creation of the world	Jowett
Philebus	Pleasure and wisdom	Jowett
Laws Book X	The materialists, the gods, and the law of impiety	Bury (1926)

Several other dialogues touch Epicurean concerns. The Protagoras contains Socrates’ argument for an art of measuring pleasures and pains. The Symposium and Phaedrus give Plato’s account of love as the soul’s ascent toward the eternal. The Crito tells why Socrates refused to escape from prison. The Sophist discusses being and not-being. All of them can be read in the Loeb translations at the Scaife reader of the Perseus Digital Library.

The Most Important Passages for Epicureans

The Canon: How We Know

• The senses deceive; the soul thinks best alone: Phaedo 65b–66a and 79c.
• Learning is recollection: Meno 81c–86b; Phaedo 72e–77a.
• Knowledge and true opinion: Meno 97d–98b.
• Being and becoming: Timaeus 27–28.
• The Form of the Good, the Line and the Cave: Republic 507a–518b.
• Astronomy without the senses: Republic 529b.
• “Knowledge is perception” and its refutation: Theaetetus 151e–160e and 184b–186e.

Nature, Gods and the Soul

• Socrates and the study of nature: Apology 19b and 26d.
• Socrates’ turn from natural science; Anaxagoras; the Forms as causes: Phaedo 96a–100e.
• The creation of the world: Timaeus 28–30; the lesser gods: 41.
• God the cause of good only, and the censorship of the poets: Republic 377b–392c.
• The royal lie: Republic 414b–415d.
• The materialists: Laws 888e–890a.
• Soul older than body: Laws 891e–896e.
• The gods care for men: Laws 899d–905d.
• The law of impiety: Laws 907d–910d.
• The immortality of the soul: Phaedo 69e–107b; Republic 608c–611a.
• Myths of the afterlife: Gorgias 523a; Phaedo 107c; Republic 614b.

Ethics

• “The unexamined life is not worth living”: Apology 38a.
• Death as sleep or migration: Apology 40c–41c.
• Philosophy as practice for dying: Phaedo 64a–67e.
• Virtue not an exchange of pleasures: Phaedo 68d–69c.
• Virtue a gift of the gods: Meno 99e–100b.
• Callicles, the leaky jar and the itch: Gorgias 491e–494e.
• Pleasant and good not the same: Gorgias 495a–500a.
• Justice as a compact, and the ring of Gyges: Republic 358e–360d.
• Philosopher-kings: Republic 473c.
• The neutral state and the comparison of pleasures: Republic 583b–588a.
• “To become like God”: Theaetetus 176a–b.
• A life of pleasure without wisdom: Philebus 21; the absence of pain: 44; pure pleasures: 51; the ranking of goods: 66.
• Pleasure as replenishment: Timaeus 64–65.

About These Translations

• Apology and Phaedo: Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Plato Vol. I (1914).
• Meno: W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library, Plato Vol. II (1924).
• Gorgias: W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library, Plato Vol. V (1925).
• Theaetetus: Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Plato Vol. VII (1921).
• Laws Book X: R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, Plato Vols. X–XI (1926).
• Republic: Benjamin Jowett, third edition (Oxford, 1888).
• Timaeus and Philebus: Benjamin Jowett.

The Loeb texts are the digital editions of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and each Stephanus reference links to the passage in the Scaife reader, where the Greek can be read alongside. The Republic follows the Project Gutenberg transcription of Jowett’s third edition, with its Stephanus references, and links each page to the scanned volume at the Internet Archive.